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The Greeks and the Utopia: an Overview Through Ancient Greek Revista Espaço Acadêmico, nº 97, junho de 2009 http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/EspacoAcademico/index The Greeks and the Utopia: an overview through ancient Greek Literature * Rosanna Lauriola ** Introduction The ideal of a perfect life characterized by harmony both among men and between men and nature, apart from evil and sickness, immune to old age and even to death, a world so perfect that does not exist and/or could not, in the end, be realized: these ideals are widespread in almost all of the world cultures, and they constantly appear through times since the beginning of human history. When the present life does not satisfy one’s expectations, when the present conditions seem to worsen more and more, it is common to dream of another life and of another world that are not simply ‘other’ than the present, but also – and foremost – a perfection of the present. This ‘other’ and ‘perfect’ life is usually located in a different time and/or different place 1. As to time, the model of a happy and perfect life is usually projected to the primordial phase of human existence, the so-called “Golden Age”, such an age that may be nostalgically recalled with and without the auspicious feeling of its rebirth 2. As to place, the same model is usually located in a distant, unknown – or completely imaginary – area, often at the borders of the known world. The huge distance in terms of location between the unsatisfying real world and the ‘other’ world tends to confer fantastic traits to the latter, or, still better, traits of which one can just dream in the present, unsatisfying world. In both cases, however, that model mostly tends to convey the specific trait of ‘nonexistence’. As a matter of fact, the Greek-rooted term “utopia” literally, and significantly, means “no-place/no-where”3. Interestingly, this term has not been coined by the ancient Greeks. The first who used the word ‘utopia’ was the British philosopher Thomas More when, in 1516, he wrote about an inexistent, imaginary island in the Atlantic Ocean where he located a society characterized by a perfect socio-political system, with equality, tolerance, justice, pacifist attitude as hallmarks, and without any trace of misery; in short, a world far different from the current England in which More was living, a world that he named “Utopia”. De optimo Rei Publicae deque nova insula Utopia, 1516 (= On the best State and on the newly discovered Island Utopia ) is indeed * The present work is a short version of a longer discussion which reviews in an extensive way the literature on utopias and utopian thought in Ancient Greek Literature from Homer to Plato with a focus on Aristophanes’ comedy. ** Rosanna Lauriola has a Ph.D. in Greek and Latin Philology and Literature. She is currently Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Idaho. R. Lauriola is the author of two books on Greek dramatic poetry (Sophocles' Oedipus Rex ; Aristophanes' The Acharnians ) and a third one is forthcoming. She is also the author of several scholarly papers related to ancient Greek authors, from Homer and Hesiod to Sophocles and Aristophanes. 1 See, e.g., Farioli 2001, pp. 3-4; 187-188. 2 See Gatz 1967, pp. 28-51; Zimmermann 1991, p. 60; Farioli 2001, pp. 15-17. 3 Utopia is the result of a compound term consisting of the negative adverb ‘ou’, meaning ‘not/no’, and the word ‘topos’, meaning ‘place’. 109 Revista Espaço Acadêmico, nº 97, junho de 2009 http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/EspacoAcademico/index the title of the short work where More indulged in creating a perfect state in the “non- place” island 4. Although the term is a modern creation, which means that the concept itself of utopia was stranger to ancient Greeks 5; although, in his first usage, the term specifically refers to the politics and to a specific literary genre, i.e., the so-called “literary utopia” 6, utopian thought and utopian motifs are identifiable in ancient Greek literature and culture since its very beginning. The modern utopia itself with its political implications, as first theorized by More, traces back to an ancient Greek tradition of searching for the so-called aristai politeiai (= the best constitutions) whose first model is the Res Publica by Plato 7. Utopian thought and motifs An utopian motif is, for instance, the perfectly happy life dislocated in time and place. The first occurrence of this ideal life is found in the poem Works and Days of the archaic Greek poet Hesiod (8 th . cent. BC). In ll. 109-120, within the concise history of humanity (the so-called ‘myth of the five races of men’) that the poet outlines to describe the gradual deterioration of life from the origin to the current world, Hesiod recalls the first age of men, the ‘Golden Age’, when men “lived like gods, with carefree heart, free and apart from trouble and pain”, and when “the fertile earth produced fruit by itself” (translation by R. S. Caldwell, Focus 1987). The first occurrence of the same ideal dislocated in place, at the borders of the known world, can be found in Homer, Odyssey 7. 114-128, in the description of the land of the Phaeacians where Odysseus happened to stop in his homecoming journey 8, a land where fruit trees grew tall and flourishing at any time, in winter as well as in summer. The difference, however, between these two occurrences does not simply concern the dislocation (time vs. space). The possibly nostalgic feeling identifiable in Hesiod’s recall of the golden age – considering his reproach to and discontent with his current time (the “iron age”: Works and Days , 174-201) – makes it be the mythic archetype of utopian thought and motifs more than Homer’s description of what is one of the several remote places Odysseus touched in his unfortunate way home. Interestingly enough, in Hesiod we can also find – far before than Plato - the archetype of what later will become the root, so to say, of the modern utopia and utopian thought in terms of theorization of a perfect political construction. In another passage of his Works and Days (ll. 225-251), while explaining the benefits of respecting Justice ( Dike ) and disregarding Outrage/Violence ( Hybris ), Hesiod set the picture of two far different cities against each other: the city ruled by Hybris – that is, an equivalent of the condition of 4 Ferguson 1975, p. 7 suggests that More intended a pun on ‘eutopia’, which means ‘good, favourable place’. On the ambiguity of the origin of ‘utopia’ from ‘ou-topos’ and ‘eu-topos’, with reference to More’s coinage, see also Quarta 1987, pp. 188-192. 5 It is very significant to note that the term itself does not exist in the ancient Greek vocabulary. The absence of a word is symptomatic of the absence of the concept that word embodies. 6 It is an almost common opinion that utopia as literary genre consisting of political and philosophical writings appears only in modern time, approximately in the 16 th .-17 th . centuries: see Momford 1969, pp. 101-109; Ferguson 1975, p. 7; Zimmermann 1991, p. 56; Farioli 2001, p. 5. 7 On More’s debt to Plato, see Mumford 1922, pp. 11-12, Farioli 2001, p. 7. The scholarship concerning More’s Utopia if very extensive. For a good summarizing analysis, see Davis 1981, pp. 41-66. 8 See Baldry 1956, pp. 4-7; Ferguson 1975, pp. 13-14; Zimmermann 1991, pp. 59-60; Farioli 2001, pp. 20-22. 110 Revista Espaço Acadêmico, nº 97, junho de 2009 http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/EspacoAcademico/index his current time – and the city ruled by Dike – which is something Hesiod hoped for and, in some way, proposed as model of the ideal city-state. It is indeed a city where famine and disaster never haunt men, the earth bears men food in plenty and peace prevails. Despite the clear idealized undertone of these Homeric and Hesiodic images, both poets did not have any awareness of the utopic nature of them, that is, there was not any ‘utopistic’ intention behind those images. The ancient Greeks thus did not have a conscious concept of utopia, nor did they consciously formulate utopias. Nonetheless, since Hesiod the two fundamental traits of the modern concept of utopia can be identified, namely: (1) the ideal of a perfect and blessed life, immune to any troubles and full of every kind of goods, combined with (2) the ideal of a perfect state, where justice and peace predominate. The combination of these motifs and the further development that each of them, both separately and together, later undergo in ancient Greek culture, have made it difficult to classify their literary expressions, that is, to assess to what degree a work, or a portion of a work, can be considered as being an utopia. However, the specificity of the literary genres in which we can find ‘utopian-oriented’ works, and the influence that the different historical-political conditions have had in shaping those works from the archaic to the post-classical period (8 th .- 3 rd . cent. BC), require an attempt of classification. ‘Utopian-oriented’ works: an attempt of classification The multiplicity of the conceptions that the several scholars who have so far focused on utopia with reference to the ancient world have produced is disconcerting 9. The multiplicity and its disconcerting effect are, indeed, a sign of the difficulty to deal with this specific topic when it refers to Greece, where – as said above – utopian literature did not exist stricto sensu .
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